Peter Sissons's new friends and old enemies

Former BBC News presenter Peter Sissons featured in this weekend's Mail on Sunday firing several broadsides at the corporation. "At today's BBC, a complaint I often heard from senior producers was that they dared not reprimand their subordinates for basic journalistic mistakes – such as getting ages, dates, titles and even football scores wrong – it being politically incorrect to risk offending them," the outspoken presenter said. He continued: "I believe I am one of a tiny number of BBC interviewers who have so much as raised the possibility that there is another side to the debate on climate change. The Corporation's most famous interrogators invariably begin by accepting that "the science is settled", when there are countless reputable scientists and climatologists producing work that says it isn't."

In the three-page piece, which can also be found online, Sissons said: "I drove out of Television Centre for the final time last month ... and I don't have a pang of regret." The 66-year-old veteran newsreader recalled the death of the Queen Mother in 2002, when Sissons's burgundy tie and supposed "insensitive" interviewing came under strident attack from some newspapers. At the time, Sissons took particular anger at comments made by none other than the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday who criticised his coverage of her death for three days straight. "Lurid and malicious," Sissons once said. "The Daily's Mail's account was just a travesty of what occurred." And now he is writing for the group. How time heals the deepest of wounds ...